“Okay. But…”
“Then I remembered that we’ve actually got another phone here, if we need it. Feather’s. I took it out of her backpack.” She handed the iPhone to me. “Take a look.”
“Isn’t there a pass code?”
“Well, yeah. It’s 6115.”
“And you know that…how?”
“I’m observant. It’s my job. Just look at it.”
I pressed the button. A scant home screen of standard apps, arranged in no evident order. “Okay, so?”
“Notice anything?”
“Not many apps.”
“Right. In fact, just the ones that come preinstalled on the phone. She hasn’t added anything. Not even Facebook.”
“Not everybody’s on Facebook, Gemma.”
“But over a billion people are. Especially women. And Feather? She’s totally the type. She’s going to be all over liking pictures of her friends’ spawn and wishing people love and light on a daily basis. Trust me.”
“So she does it on a computer instead of her phone.”
“Maybe. But now check the photos.”
The Photo app was on the top row of the home screen. I clicked on the most recent picture, feeling like an intruder. It was a not-great shot of everyone getting ready to board the raft yesterday morning. “So?”
“Scroll back.”
I rolled up through the pictures, going back in time. There were a few more of the group in various locales, some shots of the canyon, the river, the raft. Typical this is what I’m doing and seeing shots from someone basically on vacation. Then the one of her and me posing near the trailhead, and finally the picture of her husband and kid she’d shown us.
“I don’t get it, Gemma.”
“I only looked at her photos because the Facebook thing intrigued me. Like you say, there’s no actual law that people have to be on social media, or have the apps on their phone. But it seemed weird to me. So I snooped. And the first one on there, well, you’ve seen it.”
“Yes. I’ve seen it before. She showed it to Molly and me. So what?”
“Okay, two things. Apart from trip photos and that one of you and her, that’s the only picture.”
“So it’s a new phone, Gemma. And that’s the first picture she took because she wants her family with her at all times. That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever seen. It’s how moms roll. And that’s also maybe why there’s not a bunch of other apps. Either she didn’t have time or it’s her first smartphone—or whatever, and who cares?”
“Look at the picture properly.”
I tapped and it filled the screen. I saw what I’d seen before. A blandly good-looking guy with a hipster beard, laughing with a kid. “Just spell it out, Gemma.”
“Doesn’t it look kind of posed?”
“Of course they posed.”
“But don’t their clothes look very well matched?”
“Well…kinda.”
“And aren’t they unusually well lit?”
I inspected the photo more closely. It had been taken in late afternoon, and you could tell where the sun had been in the sky from the long shadows. But yes, it seemed like there’d been a second light source, too, because there were no hard shadows on the subjects’ faces.
“So she got lucky. Or used fill-in flash.”
“Judging by how crooked all her other shots are, I’m not sure she’s at the fill-in-flash level, Nolan.”
“Someone else took it, then.”
“Christ, have it your way. But here’s the real thing. I know that guy.”
“You know Feather’s husband?”
“Aha.” She held up a finger. “I didn’t say that. And I don’t know him know him. But I’ve seen him before. Several times. And we were at the same party once.”
“Seriously? When?”
“When I covered fashion. He’s a model, Nolan.”
“So…”
“Who lives in San Francisco.”
“But—”
“For God’s sake, Nolan. He’s gay. He’s a gay model who’s gay and that’s not a family photo. It’s a magazine fashion shot.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m actually eighty percent certain it would be for the Sundance collection, because the fabrics look familiar. And there are no contacts on that phone, Nolan. No texts. No emails. No recent calls.”
“No emails? She said she’d sent the picture of me and her to her husband. Molly—you were there.”
“Yes,” Molly said. “I was. And she did say that.”
“Fine. But this really doesn’t prove anything. Maybe she’s actually single, and embarrassed about it. Or…”
Ken was standing apart from the group, staring into space—or, rather, into the blackness that surrounded our small pool of light in the center of the room. “Ken? What do you think?”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Kept staring into the dark, absent-mindedly chewing his lip. “I saw you right after I got the call about Palinhem wanting someone to do a ride-along on a show. Yes?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “You were, uh, unenthusiastic. We went drinking in Santa Monica.”
“And I ranted on. I remember. And you were all Californian about it and kept buying drinks and saying ‘It is what it is’ and you were right and eventually I got it out of my system and we moved on to other things and further alcohol. And so I don’t think I even told you about the other part.”
“What other part?”
“One of the things that came with the bump to cable was network oversight. Which also pissed me off, but we needed this. So I was asked to submit a list of subjects we were hoping to cover. Kincaid’s cavern wasn’t even on the first page of ideas, because, well, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that we’d find it, plus it would be a more expensive trip than usual and involve serious hiking, so fuck that. But an email came smartly back saying how much they liked the sound of that one, and we should do it first, with a Palinhem ride-along.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this at the time?”
“Because it didn’t seem to matter.”
“And it does now?”
“I don’t know, Nolan. But Gemma’s right. That picture doesn’t look kosher to me.”
“Shh,” Molly said suddenly.
Ken and I fell silent. And then we could all hear the sound of the slow handclap.
It stopped almost immediately, but it was clear where it had been coming from.
We walked together down the passage and stopped a couple of yards short of the stone ball.
“Feather?” I said. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re back. Funny thing…we were just talking about you.”
“I know. I heard.”
“Weird…that you got back just as it was happening.”
“Oh, I’ve been here the whole time, Nolan.”
“You’ve…what?”
“I’ve been sitting here quietly.”
“Didn’t you hear us shouting for you earlier?”
“Of course.”
“So how come you didn’t answer?”
“Nothing to say.”
Ken took over. “Okay, love. So…did you go down the shaft and try to latch up with Dylan?”
“No. There’s really no point.”
“Why?”
“Dylan’s dead, I’m afraid.”
“What?” I said. “What…makes you think that?”
“The fact that I killed him yesterday.”
Chapter
35
Nobody moved.
“Feather…if that’s supposed to be a joke,” I said carefully, “you missed the mark. By a very long way.”
“It’s no joke,” she said. “He was waiting down at the river like a good and faithful servant. He’d met up with some guy and got extra food and water, and came back just as fast as he could. So I climbed down and got on the raft and, well, events ensued. A necessary fatality occurred.”
“Feather,” Ken said, “this isn’t funny.”
“No, I can imagine.”
“So then what?” I said. “You climbed back up and pretended he hadn’t been there? Why?”
“Well, first I took the raft down to the beach where we’d been staying. Which was not easy, by myself. Landed it and put up a couple of tents and tables and chairs. It’s pretty realistic, I think. After that, yes, I came back in the dinghy and back up the shaft. Heck of a day, exertion-wise. I did bring some water, but only enough for me. Sorry. I was tired.”
“The dinghy’s still down there?”
“Yes. But it’s well hidden.”
A large part of me was still trying to believe this was a very poorly judged attempt at humor. The human mind is fiercely protective of what it believes to be true about the world, especially if those beliefs are unspoken or taken for granted at a deep level. It’s like the moment when you learn someone you love has died unexpectedly, or you find out your wife has been having an on-off affair with someone you thought was something like a friend, a man you’d had a convivial lunch with only a couple of days before. Our minds can’t immediately process reversals of that magnitude. They will do everything they can to make the evidence—the phone call from your crying father saying your mother had a heart attack, or the “I thought you should know” email from your wife’s best friend—fit somehow with the previous narrative, in which those inexplicable things aren’t true and never could be.
But your soul knows. Your soul most likely had an inkling long before the events you’re struggling to comprehend had even occurred, sensitive as it is to currents and changes too subtle for the conscious mind to observe, and responsive as it can be to the futures shaping themselves in front of you.
And so your soul sits waiting for you to catch up.
And in the moment when I stood there, not knowing what to say, I had a flash recollection of Feather’s face when she’d gotten stuck on the other side of the main room in the seconds after the big stone ball was unleashed. The way she’d been frozen in fear, or so I’d thought. Some higher-level function of my brain, late to the party but suddenly full of insight, now made a belated but forceful cross-reference to how she’d responded when bucked out of the boat into the hectic rapids on the first day: the fast, decisive, and athletic way in which she’d dealt with both the physical and mental challenge.
I looked again upon my internal picture of her face and wondered whether instead of fear and confusion, I could see calculation—the making of a quick judgment call that needed to be followed by a convincing display of apparent flight.
I wondered this, and immediately knew the answer.
“You said ‘necessary,’” I said. “Why?”
“Dylan was a dick but basically a decent guy,” she said. “When you guys didn’t return, he was always going to go and get help.”
“And why didn’t you want that? What’s going on, Feather?”
“You’ve found something very important, Nolan. Possibly the most important thing that’s ever been found. I wasn’t lying back at the hotel, when I said I’m a big fan of yours. I really am. We all are, at the Foundation. We have other irons in the fire. Other people out looking for us. They don’t know that’s what they’re doing, either, naturally. Not even Kristy, and she’s famously smart.”
“What,” I said slowly, “are you talking about?”
“The permafrost crack in Alaska. There was speculation there might be something of interest to us deep down in it, another example of what we believe is here in this canyon. It’s a long shot, but you never know. I don’t know what’s happened with that one yet. You’ve got my phone, of course.”
“Feather,” Ken said. His face was composed and his voice extremely calm. I’d seen him that way once before. A bar fight broke out soon afterward. “How about you stop being a cunt and tell us what the fuck is going on.”
“That’s not a nice word, Ken.”
“I know. But unless you’re a fantasist having a mental breakdown then you’ve murdered the one bloke who could get us out of here. Deliberately fucking us up. So pardon my fucking Anglo-Saxon, love, and just tell us.”
“I’m not going to do that,” she said. “My instructions are to let events unfold. To wait, and hope.”
When she spoke again her voice was quieter, as though she’d moved farther away. “But out of respect, Nolan, I’ll tell you that you already know what you’ve found. Or could work it out, at least. I wish you were on this side with me. There’s so much we could do together. You’re cleverer than people think, and you’ve got all the pieces in there. You’ve just got to put them together. It won’t save you, unfortunately. But it might be satisfying to know you’ve been right all along.”
“Feather…”
“You’re going to change the world, Nolan. Forever. Be proud.”
And then she was gone.
Part Three
“Then why do you want to know?”
“Because learning does not consist only of
knowing what we must or we can do,
but also of knowing what we could do,
and perhaps should not do.”
—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
So the Lord said,
“I will blot out man whom I have created from
the face of the land, man and animals and
creeping things and birds of the heavens,
for I am sorry that I have made them.”
—Genesis 6:7
Chapter
36
We walked back up to the main room and sat in a circle. For a while, nobody had anything to say. After we’d heard Feather’s footsteps receding, Pierre called out to her. The sound rebounded flatly in the passage. And sounded dumb. It wasn’t Pierre’s fault. It was the fact that this name—the name each of us had called out many times in the last twenty-four hours, out of concern for her safety and in the increasingly urgent hope that she was on her way back with help—now conjured a very different picture. She’d never needed our help, and she had never gone to seek any for us.
I could see several of the others struggling through the mental process I’d undergone, reframing everything Feather had done. Pierre and Molly were the most withdrawn. Gemma had been a few steps ahead of us, of course. She’d rapidly jumped to conclusions after going through Feather’s phone—and she’d been right. She too, though, seemed extremely tired and drawn.
Ken’s face was unreadable, but I knew he was capable of getting his head around a dark new world faster than any of us. He was a pragmatist, used to rolling with punches, from actors being airlifted to rehab in the middle of expensive shoots to being fired the day before principal photography on what would have been the biggest movie of his life, a career game-changer, because the studio felt like it.
And me? I was there, pretty much. Certainly there enough to know anything that had happened before this didn’t matter.
All that mattered was what we did next.
One of the advantages of being a smoker is you are never in doubt as to the most appropriate response to any circumstance, whether it be good or…really, really bad. I lit up a cigarette and passed it to Ken. He smoked half of it without looking at me, and then passed it back.
“What’d she mean?”
“When?”
“When she said you had all the pieces.”
“Don’t know. She’s obviously been sitting on the other side of that rock the whole day, listening. And we all talked to her last night, told her what we’d found up to that point. So she knows everything we know. Presumably it’s a piece of that information, or a combination of pieces adding up to something bigger.”
“So what do we have? List it.”
“A bunch of passages and tunnels, with rooms, most of them completely empty. The pool with the metal spheres, which have now moved.”
“Moved?” Gemma said.
Ken told everyone what we’d found just before the phone
thing with Feather blew up. He did not need to explicitly explain it meant that any hope of additional water had vanished.
Then he nodded at me to continue.
“Plus there’s a room with black stuff on the ground that smells bad and may be loosening up. And a fissure out the back that leads to that cave beyond. Then there’s Gemma thinking something brushed against her in the dark.”
“It did.”
“Okay.”
Ken nodded thoughtfully. “That’s it?”
“And it adds up to zip so far as I’m concerned. I’ll kick it over to the boys in the back brain and see if they can connect the dots, but right now…I got nothing.”
“So what do we do?”
“First, accept that we’re not getting any help from Feather. Which means anybody else either. Nobody’s coming.” I saw Molly start to blink rapidly. “Sorry, Moll—but that’s the deal. No point pretending otherwise.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s my head. It really hurts.”
Mine did, too, and my mouth felt like it was full of old cardboard. “It’s down to us to try to find a way out. But we’re obviously changing the conditions here by exploring. That’s already lost us our water supply. I don’t want to make things any worse. So…”
“There’s no choice,” Pierre said. He spoke slowly, and then paused to blink, scrunching his eyes up tight. “If we don’t do anything then it’s going to get worse anyway. I don’t know about you guys but I feel like crap. Headache. Weak. Fuzzy. Doing nothing is not an option.”
“That’s exactly where I was going,” I agreed. “We need to get on it, and fast.”
“Okay then.” Ken stood up decisively. Staggered. “Ooh. Nice little head rush. So. What’s the plan?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Shame,” he said. “You were on a roll there for a while. Okay. We haven’t looked up all the passages yet, have we?”
The Anomaly Page 18
